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A niche is a segment of the population that has a specific problem to solve. As an entrepreneur, your goal is to solve this problem. To help you learn how you can pick a profitable niche for your online business, we will talk about the Who, the What and the How of your online business. You will discover how you can niche down in 5 simple steps so you can help your audience solve their problems while you earn an income online.
How to Find a Need in the Market
When you pick a profitable niche for your online business, you need to consider a few things:
- What do you love to learn about?
- What do you love to talk about?
- What are you good at?
- What do people come to you when they have questions?
- What kind of problems are people willing to pay for the get help with solving?
Once you answer these questions, you should be able to come up with some excellent niche ideas.
You might love to learn and talk about online marketing but people might come to you with questions about health and wellness. If that’s the case, you have to pick one of the two and focus on it. Since people are willing to pay to get help with online marketing AND health and wellness, any of these two niches would be profitable. Just pick one.
You might know more about health and wellness than online marketing but it doesn’t mean that you can’t pick online marketing as your niche. Being knowledgeable or skilled at something means you know more than your audience. You only need to be one step ahead.
Once you picked your niche, you need to find a need in the market. For example, if you picked health and wellness, the need might be weight loss or more energy. If you picked online marketing, the need might be more readers, more email subscribers.
Profitable Niches List
If you are still not sure of what niche you want to use, here’s a list of the some of the most profitable niches to get you started:
- Health and Fitness
- Relationships
- Make Money Online
- Personal finances
- Pets
- Personal Development
- Blogging for moms
- Fitness
- Survival/homesteading
- Parenting/homeschooling
- Clean food recipes
- Gadgets and Technology
I love this list of the Top 21 Highest Paid Bloggers. It’s interesting to see the diversity of the niches they are in as well as what constitutes their income.
How to Niche Down
As you learn how to pick a profitable niche for your online business, you need to understand the importance of niching down. When you are just starting, the more specific you are about who you are trying to reach and what problems they are wanting to solve, the better. As you grow a larger audience, it’s ok to write about more general topics. To niche down, you need to pick 3-5 subcategories (sub-niches) within your overarching niche.
For example, I also have a Paleo blog, and here are the subcategories I picked:
- Simple recipes
- Fasting
- Superfoods/Supplements
- Weight loss
- Gut health
Niche Down In 5 Steps
To help you pick a profitable niche for your online business, let me break down the process of niching down in 5 simple steps. I know finding the right niche might seem difficult at first, so I thought you would find these steps useful:
- Pick your profitable niche using my niche list above. See where your passions meet your skills and the market.
- Pick 5 categories within your niche. Decide which more specific topics would work well for you. Decide what you want to write about and what topics will help you best solve your audience’s problems using your products (always keep in mind your paid products like affiliate products or digital products). Moreover, you can check your competitors and see what sub-niches they have chosen.
- Focus on providing content within these sub-niches. Solve problems within your sub-niches. Create lots of content using the same topics from different angles. Check your keyword ideas on ubbersugest. See what related keywords come up and plan multiple posts using these keywords. For more ideas to drive traffic to your content, read Blogging 101 for Network Marketers.
- Test your audience. See which topics get the most traction (whether it’s on Pinterest, YouTube or social media).
- Adjust as needed. As you see what pieces of content start ranking on Google and become popular on Pinterest, create more similar content. Focus less on whatever doesn’t receive attention try new sub-niches if needed.
More Sub-Niche Ideas
Let me give you more sub-niche ideas, to make sure you understand how niching down works.
In the Relationship Niche:
- Online Dating
- Dating Advice for Women
- How to Save Your Marriage
In the Make Money Online Niche:
- SEO optimization
- Blogging
- YouTubing
- Online Jobs
- Email Marketing
In the Personal Finances Niche:
- Investment Options
- Saving Options
- Getting Out of Debt
- Side Income Ideas
You see? Now, I think you have enough to get the juices flowing.
Your Customer Avatar
It’s not everything to narrow down what you are going to talk about. You need to understand who you are trying to reach. Think of who your ideal customer is. Very often, this person is a version of yourself 2-5 years ago.
Why Create a Customer Avatar
If you have a food blog and your target audience has lots of money to spend on food, it will have an impact on what recipes you share. If you want to target budget-minded moms who want simple recipes, you will create the type of recipes these moms want. That’s why it’s important to understand your ideal customer or customer avatar.
How to Create Your Customer Avatar
Many people get very specific when they create their customer avatar. They go as far as giving her a name! Here are some questions to ask yourself about your ideal customer as a starting point:
- How old is she?
- What’s her marital status?
- What’s her income?
- Where does she live?
- What social media platform does she like best?
- What kind of information is she searching for?
- What are her main struggles?
- What is her profession?
- What are her dreams?
- Does she have children?
- How would her product or service help her?
- What would her objections be about your product or services?
Once you have answered these questions, you are better equipped to speak to her needs and desires.
Putting It All Together
Now that you know which topics you want to talk about (the What) and who you are creating content for (the Who), we need to examine how you will be solving her problems (the How).
The Who, the What and the How of Picking a Profitable Niche for Your Online Business
I like to say that blogs don’t make money, businesses do. To pick a profitable niche for your online business, it’s important to understand how you will be making money through solving your ideal customer’s problems. As you create your content within your sub-niches, you not only need to keep in mind who you are speaking to but how you will be helping her as well.
The How
The How of picking your niche is all about solving your customer avatar’s problems. How are you going to solve these problems? What products and services are you going to be offering? Consider various affiliate product options within your niche to start. You can Google “affiliate programs” and your niche’s name for ideas. Once you have figured out the How, it will help you create useful content for your customer avatar.
You want to create content that gives solutions to your customer’s problems and part of the solution will be your affiliate products. For more tips on how you can create useful content to make your online business profitable, read How I Made $300 On My Blog With Only 12 Blog Posts.
Executing Keyword Research for Your Content
Once you have decided what your sub-niches will be, you need to figure out how to create content that addresses the What, the Who and the How. A good way to get started is with keyword research.
Let’s say you are in the relationship niche and you decided to promote and affiliate program to help couples reignite the spark in their relationship. Here’s what you could do:
- Enter the keyword reignite the spark in Google and Pinterest and see what other ideas come up. This exercise will give you may more ideas for specific content that solve your audience’s problems.
- Read some of the articles that come up on the first page. You will need to create even better content to rank for these keywords.
- Install and use the Chrome extension Keywords Everywhere. Many times, you will be able to use some of the related keywords in your sub-headings. Or, you may use them for more content ideas.
- Check Ubbersuggest to see how much traffic you could get for your keyword ideas. If your site is new, it’s a good idea to stay around 100 monthly visits or below.
Crafting a Click-Worthy Title
People will not read your content if your titles are not click-worthy. Some of the suggestions that appear in the search engines are helpful to create an excellent title. Titles that start with “How to” usually do well. Another effective approach is to create a title that includes a superlative, a number, and the desired result. For example: “11 Best Ways to Reignite a Sexless Relationship“. Moreover, include Power Words whenever possible.
Presenting the How to the Who in the Context of the What
You have your niche, and the exact topic you want to write about and your title (the What). You know who your ideal customer is (the Who). You picked your How in the form of an affiliate program but how do you promote it in the context of your content?
It’s simple, you write up your post and provide all the information you can provide to answer all the questions that relate to your chosen keywords. Then, you can talk about the affiliate program as another solution. Furthermore, you can collect email addresses and create an email sequence that will talk about the benefits of the program.
Read more in How to Make Money with Email Marketing.
For more guidance on putting the who, the what and the how together, check out the course Online Business for Her. It will take you step-by-step through the process and you will be able to sign up for a free training too! Natalie Bacon always over-delivers, you will not regret signing up.
In Summary
How to pick a profitable niche for your online business is a clever combination of understanding your skills, your passion, and the market. It’s about understanding who needs what you offer and share some useful information to promote your paid products and services. If you need more help with picking a niche and starting a blog don’t forget to check out my workshop on creating a niche site.